Ilaria Salis will finally be released from prison. Three Hungarian judges granted it house arrest, which the anti-fascist activist will have to spend in an apartment in Budapest, after paying a deposit of 40 thousand euros and applying the electronic bracelet. The decision, according to the words of the magistrates, is due to the absence of the risk of escape, to the willingness to collaborate on the terms of custody and good behavior in prison during these 16 long months of detention. Conditions, to tell the truth, which were already present on March 28, when the judge Jozsef Sos he rejected the request for house arrest presented by Salis’ lawyers without even retiring in chambers.
Ilaria will not return to Italy yet, nor is it a liberation. He continues to face a 20-year prison sentence. We must not forget this. But the news that has arrived from Hungary is the good kind that makes you smile. It’s a success. Partial, but still a success. And, in fact, this is how practically all Italian political and media actors consider it. Which, however, a second later they split on the reasons.
There are those who maintain that obtaining house arrest is due to popular mobilization, to the fact that the issue has become a political case and not just a judicial one. Ilaria’s father, Roberto Salisinterviewed by Corriere della Sera, for example, states: “I think the strong popular mobilization in Italy, the attention of public opinion on an affair that appears absurd from whatever side you want to look at it, had a huge impact, making it a media event. Even with the candidacy for the European elections.” The Alleanza Verdi Sinistra is also rejoicing as it has nominated it for the next European elections, in the North-West and Islands constituencies: “raising your voice helps”.
On the role of the government, Roberto Salis adds: “I don’t have pebbles in my shoes, but large gravel, […] my feet are bloody. Italian citizens are tired of having to beg the institutions to act, the institutions are at the service of the citizens. We pay the Minister of Justice and Foreign Affairs to work for us, we have not seen no concrete activity to resolve the Iaria problem by these two ministries.”
On the contrary, the Italian political and media ultra-right claims that if this result has been achieved it is only due to the underground work of diplomacy. The Foreign Minister Tajani: “It’s proof that when you work under the radar, and don’t beat the drums, the results come.” The title of the book is also indicative Sheet: “The strategy of silence releases Salis from prison. Other than running for the European elections. The left-wing militant obtains house arrest in Hungary thanks to diplomatic work that has been continually put at risk by the politicization of the case.”
They are two opposing theses. Irreconcilable. With enormous implications. In fact, if the first were true, it would mean that mobilization and protest are certainly useful. Other than that phrase of apparent common sense that every activist continually hears repeated, whatever the trenches of his struggle: “It’s no use anyway”. Thus, Ilaria Salis’s house arrest would demonstrate that popular mobilization is useful, because it affects decision-making processes and can lead to opening up spaces of possibility where none were previously visible.
If the second were true, however, it would mean that the virtue we must acquire is first and foremost the patience. We must be patient because politics and institutions are at our service and act in our interest. It is a prodromal thesis to the passivization of the masses. Their autonomous action, in fact, causes damage. “Letting institutions do their thing” – those who know and have power – helps.
Who is right? If we limit ourselves to reading statements and headlines we won’t get far. What will make us lean towards the first or the second will be the previous ideological approach. What is missing, in fact, are the facts. Are there any that help to understand the reasons for the Hungarian judges’ decision? Luckily we have something.
I start from the decision itself. If the judges finally granted house arrest to Ilaria Salis, after having refused it to her last March 28 in the presence of the same legal conditions, it means that the popular mobilization and the politicization of the case they have not done all the damage that the ultra-right fears in the words of its political exponents and in the columns of its journalists.
Then there is a report from the Hungarian embassy in Italy to the government in Budapest. The ambassador Adam Kovacsa close associate of Orbàn, a week before the judges’ ruling sent a dossier on the Salis case to Budapest: a bunch of newspaper articles, writings on the web with which Kovacs points out to Viktor Orbàn that this story is becoming a boomerang for the Hungarian government. That the affair is now a political affair, even before a judicial one, with much damage to Hungary’s image (and, who knows, also for its fans, starting with Meloni & Co.).
Nice timing, there’s nothing to say. Which shows that, no matter how much the established power tries to push us all to remain in the privacy of our homes (for those who have them), the truth of history tells us that popular mobilization is the key actor capable of changing the course of our lives.
PS: It is surprising that no one – or almost no one – appeals to the independence of the judiciary. Probably because many consider Hungary to be one “democracy” in which the division of powers is no longer guaranteed. However, the truth is that the judiciary, although formally independent, is still embedded in an environmental and social reality that conditions its decisions. For this reason, in reality, mobilizing is always useful. Because even the decisions of the judiciary are the result of the times in which we live.
